author
carlyo | April 25, 2014Guest Blog By Andrea Beaty
New York Times bestselling author of Rosie Revere, Engineer and Iggy Peck, Architect along with children’s novels, Dorko the Magnificent and Attack of the Fluffy Bunnies
Kids are their own worst critics. Perfectionism can reduce even very young children to hysterics over toppled towers, drawing disasters and other creative catastrophes. It breaks our parenting hearts to watch and we rush in with hugs and kind words to soften the blow. I confess that when my kids were young, I sometimes resorted to less dignified tactics to calm them. “Look! . . . It’s Barney! . . .…
carlyo | February 10, 2012
By Larry Bock
Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival
It's both funny and remarkable how some of the most simple and natural acts we do each day are teeming in science.
Take for example, the kiss.
A kiss, especially a passionate one, sets off a cascade of emotions and chemical reactions in our brain and body that would surprise most of us if we knew the whole story.
Well, just in time for Valentine's Day, Sheril Kirshenbaum, science writer and author of the recent book, The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us, sheds light on exactly what goes on…
carlyo | February 8, 2012 By Sean Connolly
Festival Featured Author
What a difference a digit makes! There I was preoccupied with making my own eggnog, checking page proofs, and It's a Wonderful Life on television. Then along comes January 1, and with it that odometer switch from "1" to "2" at the end. Suddenly 2012 is this year.
And this year means a trip to DC in late April for the USA Science and Engineering Festival. A festival appearance gets us authors out of our garrets, blinking as we meet the real people out there. And it's those real people--particularly the young ones--who make it all so much fun.
I can…
carlyo | February 6, 2012Sitting elbow to elbow with strangers in the movie theatre is nothing new to the average American. However, when you are cramped in a packed theatre and you hear a cough every now and then while watching the movie Contagion, well that's another story. Even if you are viewing this movie in the comfort of your home, your mind will start to wonder about the thousands of hands that could have touched this disk you received in your mailbox this afternoon from Netflix. Then it begins..."What have I been exposed to?" My irrational fear as well as fascination about epidemics first grew after the…
carlyo | February 1, 2012
"The periodic table is the universal catalog of everything you can drop on your foot"
--Theodore Gray
You have the amazing opportunity to hear from best-selling author Theodore Gray at this year's USA Science and Engineering Festival Book Fair! Gray will be speaking at the Teen Non-Fiction Festival Stage at 11:50 am on Saturday, April 28th. His newest book is Theodore Gray's Elements Vault: Treasures of the Periodic Table with Removable Archival Documents and Real Element Samples - Including Pure Gold! Gray's other books, The Elements and Mad Science, are international bestsellers, as is…
laelaps | March 16, 2010
Blogs, as Carl Zimmer astutely noted at this year's ScienceOnline conference, are software. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether science bloggers can or should replace science journalists the fact of the matter is that science blogs are the independent expressions of a variety of writers about subjects which they feel passionate about. There is no single science blog archetype that all blogs must fit, and this flexibility allows science writers the freedom to compose and promote their work in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
Hindsight being what it is, of course, I can look…
laelaps | March 15, 2010
Writing a popular science book has simultaneously been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my writing career so far. It was not so much something that I wanted to do as a task that I needed to do, and without that sense of resolve Written in Stone would probably be a half-finished manuscript left to rot on my hard drive. While hard-headed persistence has been essential to writing my book, though, it was not the only thing I required, and through this blog conversation with David Williams (author of Stories in Stone; blog) and Michael Welland (author of Sand; blog) I hope to…